Influence of culture and age on the self-reference effect

ABSTRACT

Relating information to oneself can enhance memory for young and older adults. However, most studies investigating self-referencing have focused on Western populations, for whom the self is considered an independent and distinct entity. Whether self-referencing as a mnemonic strategy similarly benefits East Asians, cultures associated with interdependent self-construal, has been investigated little, particularly with age. In this study, we investigated the effect of self-reference on memory for both younger and older adults from American and Taiwanese cultures, predicting that self-referencing would be a less effective strategy for younger and older adults from Taiwan compared to Americans. Results reveal some cultural differences with age, with Taiwanese older adults benefitting less from self-referencing than younger Taiwanese, though the effect did not differ with age for Americans, or between younger adults across cultures. Thus, our results suggest that the potential mnemonic benefits of self-referencing may be limited in older adults from Eastern cultures.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• self
• aging
• culture
• source memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Please see Supplementary Materials for analyses including valence.

2. Because it was not possible to match samples simultaneously on all variables, we re-ran the analysis including other demographic and neuropsychological measures that significantly differed across cultural groups as a covariate (i.e., Trails A and years of education). The critical three-way interaction of age, culture, and memory condition remained significant (p = .04) when Trails A scores were used as a covariate and was marginal (p = .05) when years of education was used as a covariate. The two-way interaction of culture × memory condition remained significant when MMSE scores were used as a covariate (because younger adults did not complete the MMSE, this analysis necessarily included only older adults).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Brandeis University;National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke [NINDS training grant (T32-NS007292; for JDJ)];National Science Foundation [BCS-1147707 (to AH)].